Free Writing as the Solution To Writer's Block: An Exersise

Writer’s block. We all have had it at one point or another. In fact, I have it right now, and thought it might be fun if I kind of walk you through my manner in which I step over the blockage that causes words to get stuck in my mind, and press forward into the land of thoughts being translated through my fingers and onto my word processing program’s white page.

It all starts with me going back to a sure fire way to get my mind lubricated to free the stuck words from their cerebral prison. This method was first brought to my attention by my high school online writing teacher (I was homeschooled) who had us do exercises where our Mom’s would set a timer for a pre-decided upon set of minutes and hand us a blank page of notebook paper, with simply one rule: the moment that timer began to tick away we had to put our pencil to the paper and write. Write about anything. Write about not having anything to write about. Write about the first thing that came to mind, even if was the Indians’ awesome win the previous evening or the family cat’s latest attempt to escape to the outdoors. There were no wrong ways to complete this activity, as long as you wrote something, until that timer went off, and then you were allowed to stop.

See so often we become concerned with trying to sound smart, or witty or creative that we forget the importance of simply putting our words on paper and communicating what we would say if we were talking to someone about whatever it is that we are writing about. A succinct set of words can be equally valuable as a flowery set of descriptive jargon can be, to a reader. Direct and to the point writing has extreme value for instance to the person who is reading an instruction manual who has very little knowledge of carpentry but has set himself to the task of assembling a wooden bookcase he bought from Wal-Mart.

Ultimately when dealt the frustrating sight of a blank, empty page, and words caught in the transition of mind to finger to page, I recommend the advice I gave a friend of mine who recently told me she was struggling to write down exactly what she wanted to say because she had so much to say. I told her that the best thing for her to do is to sit down and write until all of those thoughts had made it out of her head and onto the page. Once she had done that, all she wanted to say was on the page or pages in front of her, she just now needed to read over those thoughts, cut out the ones that didn’t express what she was trying to say, and leave only the solid gems of what she was trying to communicate.

Starting is always step one, and step one sometimes really is the hardest one to take! Opening up the mysterious and awesome portal of thoughts transitioning into written words is truly one of the great miracles of how God designed our brains to function through communication. Words are awesome! Ideas rock! Communicating with words about those ideas is where the breakdown often happens. The key is to not become so overwhelmed by the blockage that you cease to write at all, the key is to write whatever comes to mind first, and follow the rabbit trail from there! I do this all the time. I just did it now. I had no idea what I was going to write when I sat down, so I wrote about writers block!